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Edna Healey has been married to Denis Healey for more than fifty years and has seen parliamentary life, both in power and opposition, from the inside. An accomplished historian and film-maker, Edna forged her own career as a writer and lecturer while her husband rose steadily to become Chancellor of the Exchequer. Edna travelled the globe with him and then moved their family to No. 11 Downing Street during his Chancellorship. Edna Healey has met many of the world's leaders from Chou En Lai to President Clinton and writes about them with great insight and candour. She retains strong links with her birthplace in the Forest of Dean and the chapters on her early life and its lasting influence make moving reading.
In 1837, at the age of twenty-three, Angela Burdett-Coutts inherited a vast fortune from her banker grandfather, making her one of the richest and thus potentially powerful women in Victorian England. She moved in the highest social circles: entertaining the rising stars of the political scene, Disraeli and Gladstone; attending scientific lectures with Faraday; pursuing her philanthropic work with Dickens; and falling in love with the aged Duke of Wellington. Her acts of charity were enormous and wide-ranging-establishing a home for 'fallen women', pioneering model housing, battling for sanitary reform, supporting the NSPCC and the RSPCA, and promoting technical education and domestic scienc...
Edna Healey has been married to Denis Healey for 60 years and has seen parliamentary life both in power and opposition. An accomplished historian and film-maker, Edna forged her own career as a writer and broadcaster while her husband rose steadily through the Labour ranks to become Secretary of State for Defence and Chancellor of the Exchequer. Edna travelled the globe with her husband, meeting many of the world's leaders. She has known all the Labour Prime Ministers from Attlee to Blair and writes about them with great insight and candour. She retains strong links with her birthplace in the Forest of Dean and the engagingly evocative chapters on her early life and its lasting influence make moving reading.
Here are portraits of three very different Victorian women, all of whom married men of exceptional talent, energy and genius. To be the wife of such frenetic, explosive characters as David Livingstone, Karl Marx or Charles Darwin, especially at this period in history, demanded rare qualities. Yet the late twentieth-century view of these women is perhaps best summed up in the frequently heard comment: 'I didn't know he had a wife.' The mid-nineteenth century was a time of unprecedented movement and upheaval. The revolutions of 1848 set Europe ablaze and sent swarms of political dissidents to seek freedom outside their homelands. Britain and her Empire were ruled by a young Queen Victoria, inspired by her enterprising, vigorous consort, Albert; it was a climate in which invention and discovery were encouraged. Men were creating new frontiers, both geographically and intellectually, and where they went their wives and families accompanied them.
A “lively” tour of the royal residence: Readers “will delight in this well-written chronicle of the House of Windsor.” —Publishers Weekly In this social history of Buckingham Palace, Edna Healey mines the royal archives to take the reader into its moonlit gardens, up the grand staircase, and inside its tapestried walls. Dr. Johnson again holds forth in the library, Queen Victoria encores Mendelssohn in the music room, and Fanny Burney wrestles once more with protocol in the royal chambers. Written with the assistance of the royal family, this lively and colorful biography of a house reveals not only the changing facade of the palace but also the changing face of a nation’s culture, morals, fashions, and tastes.
Much has been written about Charles Darwin but this is the first biography of his strong, intelligent wife. Emma Wedgwood, granddaughter of the famous Josiah, married Charles Darwin in 1839, three years after he returned from his extraordinary voyage on the Beagle. Their life together was intellectually exciting though overshadowed by personal tragedy. Edna Healey has discovered new, and hitherto unpublished, material and has had the full support of the Darwin family in writing this major biography.
Much has been written about Charles Darwin but this is the first biography of his strong, intelligent wife. Emma Wedgwood, granddaughter of the famous Josiah, married Charles Darwin in 1839, three years after he returned from his extraordinary voyage on the Beagle. Their life together was intellectually exciting though overshadowed by personal tragedy. Edna Healey has discovered new, and hitherto unpublished, material and has had the full support of the Darwin family in writing this major biography.
It is easy to forget in our own day of cheap paperbacks and mega-bookstores that, until very recently, books were luxury items. Those who could not afford to buy had to borrow, share, obtain secondhand, inherit, or listen to others reading. This book examines how people acquired and read books from the sixteenth century to the present, focusing on the personal relationships between readers and the volumes they owned. Margaret Willes considers a selection of private and public libraries across the period—most of which have survived—showing the diversity of book owners and borrowers, from country-house aristocrats to modest farmers, from Regency ladies of leisure to working men and women. Exploring the collections of avid readers such as Samuel Pepys, Thomas Jefferson, Sir John Soane, Thomas Bewick, and Denis and Edna Healey, Margaret Willes also investigates the means by which books were sold, lending fascinating insights into the ways booksellers and publishers marketed their wares. For those who are interested in books and reading, and especially those who treasure books, this book and its bounty of illustrations will inform, entertain, and inspire.
The classic political thriller that foretold the rise of Corbyn, from the acclaimed author of A View from the Foothills
The memoirs of a leading politician, this work is also an autobiography of Denis Healey. He was born in 1917, expanded his political views at Oxford, and also became an MP for Leeds in 1952. 'The Time of my Life' also illuminates his love of literature, art, music and photography.